Artistic influence and reception (incl. Architecture)

This publication brings together essays by scholars of both medieval and contemporary art offering a cross-disciplinary approach of both periods. It investigates how contemporary artists and contemporary art historians perceive medieval art and reciprocally how medieval art historians envisage the echoes of medieval artforms and esthetics in contemporary art. The volume follows on from the symposium organized in conjunction with the exhibition "Make it New: Carte Blanche à Jan Dibbets" that was held at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (Paris) in 2019 and which presented side by side Hrabanus Maurus’s De Laudibus Sanctae Crucis (In Praise of the Holy Cross) a masterpiece of Carolingian art with works by artists associated with conceptual art mininimal art and land art.

How and why has medieval art and particularly early medieval art inspired contemporary artists since the 1950s? What has medieval art contributed to contemporary art? How has medieval art’s treatment of figures color space geometry and rhythm provided inspiration for contemporary artists’ experiments with form? In what way does contemporary artists’ engagement with the topics of formatting writing semiosis mimesis and ornamentation draw inspiration from medieval models? To what extent and in what sense are the notions of authorship and performativity relevant for understanding conceptions of artmaking in both periods? Rather than focusing on medievalism and citational practices or on the theory of images—both approaches having already produced an important body of comparative readings of medieval and contemporary art—the essays in this volume address the question of medieval art’s contemporaneity thematically through three trans-chronological topics: authorship semiosis and mathematics and performance. Engaging the artists’ works as well as their writings these studies conflate conceptual and esthetic perspectives.

Ivan Lukačić (born around 1585 died in 1648) composer Conventual Franciscan long-time “maestro di cappella” of the cathedral in Split is a typical “hero” of local historiography. As early as 1935 the Croatian-American musicologist Dragan Plamenac (real name Karl Siebenschein) prepared a selection from the only known collection of Lukačić’s compositions the Sacrae cantiones (Venice 1620). In the same year Plamenac introduced Croatian Renaissance and Baroque music to the local audience for the first time at a concert held at the Croatian Music Institute. In the aftermath of Plamenac’s emigration to the USA in 1939 it took several decades for new archival stylistic interdisciplinary and international research in Croatian musicology to take place. Despite the availability of earlier material as well as contemporary musical publications of Lukačić’s work (J. Andreis Zagreb 1970; E. Stipčević Padua 1986) it is not an exaggeration to say that Lukačić still remains unknown internationally. For many years a number of studies of Lukačić and the music of his contemporaries from the “other eastern coast of the Adriatic” published almost exclusively in Croatian and thus the international professional public had very limited access to them. This collection of studies dedicated to Lukačić and to the musical and cultural contacts between the two Adriatic coasts is the first volume to be published in both English and Italian. The echoes of the contacts between Italy and Croatia reached the Royal Palace in Portugal shops selling printed music in Denmark and church archives in Slovenia and Poland. The aim of this book is to follow the traces of that cultural dissemination.

Cet ouvrage invite à retracer l’histoire des relations culturelles entre les communautés de Mésopotamie et du Caucase durant le Néolithique et le Chalcolithique par une étude des mécanismes d’innovation et de transmission des connaissances en architecture. Le premier objectif est de caractériser ces échanges techniques pour déterminer si les communautés du Caucase se sont installées de manière autonome ou si elles ont profité de l’expérience de celles de Mésopotamie. Le second objectif est de comprendre l’évolution de l’architecture "complexe" au Samarra et à l’Obeid et de mesurer l’impact social de l’expansion obeidienne. Ces recherches montrent que le milieu du sixième millénaire marque un tournant dans les échanges techniques et les relations culturelles entre ces deux régions. Auparavant ces échanges apparaissent diffus dans les régions situées au nord de la Mésopotamie centrale. Ensuite l’expansion obeidienne entraîne une homogénéisation progressive des techniques dans l’ensemble du bassin syro-mésopotamien à laquelle se sont greffés emprunts techniques et adaptations régionales.